Is hiring more conservative professors and admitting more conservative students a solution to liberal bias in American higher education?
Many people think so. The Trump administration, in threatening to cut Harvard’s federal funding, demanded that the university foster greater “viewpoint diversity,” including by recruiting faculty members and students who would restore ideological balance to campus. Other political actors have embraced the idea, too. At least eight states have passed or introduced laws to require viewpoint diversity at public educational institutions.
Certainly, there is not enough engagement with conservative ideas on college campuses. Schools can and should do more to ensure that students encounter a greater range of political perspectives in syllabuses and among speakers invited to give talks.
But a policy of hiring professors and admitting students because they have conservative views would actually endanger the open-minded intellectual environment that proponents of viewpoint diversity say they want. By creating incentives for professors and students to have and maintain certain political positions, such a policy would discourage curiosity and reward narrowness of thought.
I am a philosophy professor whose views are, for the most part, politically progressive. When I teach the social contract — the theory that underpins many of our ideas about government and its justification — I assign the work of the philosopher Robert Nozick, one of the most prominent and effective defenders of libertarianism. I do so because I want my liberal students to be challenged and my libertarian students to think carefully about the arguments that support their position.
Mr. Nozick’s own story helps show why hiring professors and admitting students for viewpoint diversity would be misguided. When he arrived at Princeton as a graduate student around 1960, he was a socialist. At Princeton he encountered the writings of the political economist Friedrich Hayek, a Nobel Prize-winning libertarian. In trying to argue against Hayek, Mr. Nozick found himself developing the ideas that would form the basis of his influential 1974 book, “Anarchy, State, and Utopia,” which made a forceful case for a minimal state.
It’s likely that Mr. Nozick’s socialist roots made him an especially sharp defender of libertarianism, since he knew the opposing position intimately. What is undoubtedly true is that his openness to intellectual engagement, not his ideological loyalty, was critical to his achievement. Had he been accepted at Princeton because of his political beliefs, would he have been so willing to change them?
Conservatives have criticized identity-based affirmative action because, they suggest, it imposes an expectation on students of color that they will represent what is presumed to be, say, the Black or Latino view on any given issue, which discourages freethinking. Admitting students for viewpoint diversity would turn the holding of conservative ideas into a quasi-identity, subject to some of the same concerns. Students admitted to help restore ideological balance would likely feel a responsibility to defend certain views, regardless of the force of opposing arguments they might encounter.
For professors hired for their political beliefs, the pressure to maintain those views would be even greater. If you had a tenure-track position, your salary, health insurance and career prospects would all depend on the inflexibility of your ideology. The smart thing to do in that situation would be to interact with other scholars who share your point of view and to read publications that reinforce what you already believe. Or you might simply engage with opposing ideas in bad faith, refusing even to consider their merits. This would create the sort of ideological echo chamber that proponents of viewpoint diversity have suggested, often with some justification, leads to closed-mindedness among left-leaning professors.
After becoming a libertarian and graduating from Princeton, Mr. Nozick was hired by Harvard, but not as a token conservative. As he recounted in an interview in 1977, he was hired not “because people knew I was a libertarian and thought that’s what they needed in the philosophy department,” but rather because of “the sorts of things that I had written and purely on intellectual grounds.”
That he was hired on the basis of the quality of his work, and not the ideological category to which his views belonged, was as important to Mr. Nozick as it is to all of us who make thinking and writing about ideas our life’s work. He knew he was free to change his mind if that was where the arguments or evidence led him.
That sort of freedom is critical for professors and students alike. If, on reading Mr. Nozick, some of my students are persuaded to reconsider their liberal positions, then I have done my job well, even if I don’t agree with Mr. Nozick’s conclusions. Those students might even become part of the next generation of conservative thinkers. And if they end up making valuable arguments, I can assure you it won’t be because they were pressured to think in just one way.
Jennifer M. Morton is a professor of philosophy at the University of Pennsylvania.
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